OA monitoring 2022: strong increase and continued demand for article funding

Why licences matter

Open access publications are freely available, but they are of course protected by copyright. As authors, researchers own the rights to their work and issue licences which clearly define how others can use their publications. These licences specify which uses are permitted (factsheet on open access, copyright, right of publication and licences).

Researchers most commonly issue Creative Commons (CC) licences (see info box “What are Creative Commons licences?”). The SNSF updated its regulations in 2023 and now requires a CC BY (short for “Creative Commons Attribution”) licence for articles. This means that the publications can be freely distributed and used, provided that the authors are cited and any changes to the content are noted.

There are no major changes in the licences used for published articles in 2022 compared to the previous year. The share of CC BY licences increased by seven percentage points. The CC BY licence remains the most widely used licence.

The proportion of problematic CC BY-NC-ND licences decreased by one percentage point. They are problematic because publications released under them may not be modified and then redistributed (ND – “No Derivatives”), which would be the case with a translation, for instance. Furthermore, these publications may not be used for commercial purposes (NC – “Non-Commercial”). Both restrictions are inconsistent with the basic idea of OA. They also contradict the objective of the National Open Access Strategy, which is to ensure that scientific knowledge is used as widely and creatively as possible.

The open CC BY licence is already the standard in gold OA. More restrictive types of CC licences are rarely used. In hybrid OA, the share of restrictive CC BY-NC-ND licences is significantly higher at 20%, but this proportion is expected to decrease. This is because CC BY licences have been a requirement in universities’ Read & Publish agreements since the first round of negotiations in 2018.

Articles with unclear or restrictive licences are mainly found in the green and other OA categories. Green OA publications only become freely available at a later stage, which explains why 56% of green OA articles cannot be published under an open licence.

In the case of other OA, these are mainly preprints made available through many different, often discipline-specific archives. We assume that the lack of licence information for other OA is mainly down to a lack of metadata and technical reasons.

How much the SNSF spends on funding OA articles

Even if scientific publications can be read and used free of charge, the publication process involves work, infrastructure and costs. Many OA journals therefore charge researchers a publication fee per article, known as an “article processing charge” (APC).

Since 2018, the SNSF has been paying these fees directly when the results of research funded by the SNSF are published in OA-only journals. Demand rose sharply after the introduction of this funding, while the average cost per article has fluctuated only slightly. Since 2022, however, demand has been growing more slowly.

As the SNSF only covers publication fees for articles in pure (gold) OA journals, most payments go to publishers who offer a wide range of journals with this business model. In 2022, 51% of the APCs were paid to the three publishers most frequently chosen by researchers: Springer Nature, Frontiers and MDPI, who together published 48% of the SNSF-funded articles. In 2023, these three publishers accounted for 45% of total costs, with approximately 39% of SNSF-funded articles published in their journals.

How much does the SNSF pay in publication costs compared to other countries? The OpenAPC initiative collects datasets on OA publication fees and makes them publicly available (see info box “What is OpenAPC?”). The OpenAPC website provides some statistics on these data. Those statistics show that, compared to other research funders, the SNSF covers a particularly large number of very expensive APCs – in particular for the journal Nature Communications. Prestigious journals such as Nature Communications are able to command above-average APCs. This is a consequence of the fact that researchers are often evaluated not on the basis of their personal achievements, but on the prestige of the journals in which they publish their work.

Developing not-for-profit alternatives

The open access movement’s hope of achieving significant savings in publication costs has not yet been realised, neither at the institutional level nor at the national or international levels. In order to control costs as the number of publications continues to grow, Switzerland’s National OA Strategy is focusing on not-for-profit-oriented alternative publication models such as diamond OA.

While these alternatives are being developed, the strategy makes it clear that they will become attractive to researchers only if quality assessment is reformed. The current efforts, such as the DORA declaration, are insufficient. The SNSF, Swiss higher education institutions and 750 other organisations worldwide are collaborating on this reform in the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).